It is known to structurally reinforce automotive vehicles by placing inserts into cavities defined in a vehicle body structure. Rigid carriers have a thermally expandable material carried thereon, which is expanded during exposure to heat in an automotive coating processing oven (e.g., an e-coat, clearcoat or paint bake oven).
Today's automotive vehicle designers face a number of challenges in building lightweight vehicle bodies that must resist deformation when loaded, such as in an impact situation. Advanced computing and fabricating technologies allow designers to create body designs with complex geometries that previously were impractical to fabricate on a large production scale. Further, many modern vehicle designs undergo considerable computer modeling before building and testing the vehicles to withstand loading from impacts. As a result, it has become necessary for vehicles to be retrofitted with custom inserts that are capable of improving the ability of the vehicle design to withstand impact.
One problem that arises with the use of some existing reinforcement structures is that they require complete sealing about their peripheries in order to achieve structural reinforcement. This unfortunately blocks the flow of coating materials such as e-coat, and could result in uneven coating coverage. Also, with some structures, the expandable materials are concentrated within plate structures and pose a problem when the expandable material expands. The pressure of the material during expansion, due to a high localized concentration can result in read-through effects, by which the location of the expansion deforms opposing sheet metal. It is also a problem with some parts that a large amount of expandable material is required, adding undesired weight to the part.
As another problem, these reinforcements are often located within cavities of structures where those cavities tend to have cross-sections that change along their lengths or other dimensions. As such, it can be difficult to design reinforcement members that correspond to the shape of those cavities while maintaining desired amounts of rigidity at the various locations along the length or other dimensions of the cavities or members.
The present invention addresses the one or more of the above problems, and represents an improvement to existing vehicle structural reinforcement.